Select annotated bibliography: Media and memory

This edition of Memory Studies centres on the theme of digital media and its role in storing cultural memory. It emphasizes how digital media in a post-scarcity culture of data acquisition and hyperconnectivity allows for an annexing of the past. Further, the articles explore how media enable certain commemorative practices that contribute to the continual creation of cultural memory.

Aleida Assmann provides an introduction to the concept of cultural memory, specifically focusing on the “arts” of its construction through various media such as writing, visual representations, bodily practices, places, and monuments. By examining the period from the European Renaissance to the present, Assmann reveals the connection between cultural memory and the arts. This book ultimately provides a comprehensive overview of the history, forms, and functions of cultural memory.

Part

Content

I. Functions

1. Memory as Ars and Vis

2. The Secularization of Memory – Memoria, Fama, Historia

3. The Battle of Memories in Shakespeare’s Histories

4. Wordsworth and the Wound of Time

5. Memory Boxes

6. Function and Storage – Two Modes of Memory

II. Media

7. Metaphors, Models, and Media of Memory

8. Writing

9. Image

10. Body

11. Places

III. Storage

12. Archives

13. Permanence, Decay, Residue – Problems of Conservation and the Ecology of Culture

14. Memory Simulations in the Wasteland of Forgetfulness – Installations by Modern Artists

Memory in Culture is an introduction to cultural memory studies, a contemporary interdisciplinary field. Erll provides a background to the ideas of pioneering figures such as Halbwachs and Nora, traces the development of cultural memory studies, and addresses theoretical questions about the socio-cultural aspects of remembering. Of particular interest is Part V: Media and Memory, the section that examines the concept and function of media memory, and the question of how cultural memory is mediated.

Part

Content

I. Introduction: Why ‘Memory’?

1. Why “memory”?

2. Why now?

3. What is meant by ‘memory’?

4. Memory, remembering or forgetting?

5. Goals and structure of this book

II. The Invention of Cultural Memory: A Short History of Memory Studies

6. Maurice Halbwachs: Mémoire collective

7. Aby Warburg: Mnemosyne – pathos formulas and a European memory of images

8. Pierre Nora’s lieux de mémoire – and beyond

9. Aleida and Jan Assmann: The Cultural Memory

III. The Disciplines of Memory Studies

10. Historical and social memory

11. Material memory: Art and literature

12. Mind and memory: Psychological approaches

IV. Memory and Culture: A Semiotic Model

13. Metaphors – productive, misleading, and superfluous, or : How to conceive of memory on a collective level

This textbook examines the dynamic relationship between memory and media. It explores how media – particularly radio, television, celebrity culture, digital media, social networks and mobile phones – supports the human desire to capture, store and retrieve memories. Additionally, it offers analyses of representations of memorable events, media tools that facilitate remembering or forgetting, media technologies for archiving, and the role of media agents in collective memory construction.

This edition of Memory Studies focuses on our immersion into and construction of densely mediated and mediatized environments. It seeks to reach a closer understanding of how memory is digitally diffused by examining cross-cultural cases.

This articles in this edition of Memory Studies thematically focus on the relative powerlessness of the individual in the processes of collective memory construction. A diversity of memory settings are represented, including Germany, Poland, the U.K., the U.S., and Argentina.

Article

Author

Editorial- Memory, Media and Menschen: Where is the individual in collective memory studies?

Wulf Kansteiner

Re-Narrations: How pasts change in conversational remembering

Harald Welzer

Historical legacy, social memory and representations of the past within a Polish community

Christopher J. Hewer, Malgorzata Kut

Film sound and American cultural memory: Resounding trauma in Sophie’s Choice

Neil Narine

“The good memory of this land”: Reflections on the processes of memory and forgetting

Ana Margarita Ramos

Book review- Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds) Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook

Jens Brockmeier, Robyn Fivush, Patrick H. Hutton

Lee, P. and Thomas, P. (eds.) (2012). Public Memory, Public Media and the Politics of Justice. Palgrave MacMillan.

Exposing how memory is constructed and mediated in different societies, this collection explores particular contexts to identify links between the politics of memory, media representations and the politics of justice, questioning what we think we know and understand about recent history.

Inspired by the work of Elihu Katz, Media, Ritual and Identity examines how media shape society through the lens of cultural anthropology. This collection reflects on how media influence democratic processes and the construction and affirmation of social identities. Comprised of case studies ranging from political ritual on television to broadcasting in the Third World, Media, Ritual and Identity offers a commanding overview of contemporary media debates.

Chapter

Author

1. The intellectual legacy of Elihu Katz

1. James Curran, Tamar Liebes

2. Mass communication, ritual and civil society

3. Political ritual on television: episodes in the history of shame, degradation and exocommunication

The Past within Us examines the processes of how knowledge of the past is communicated in an age of mass media. It draws on examples from East Asian, American, and European history to study what occurs when accounts of history are transferred from one medium to another. Moreover, Morris-Suzuki expands on the key challenges for the communication of history in a multimedia age.

Twenty concise and thought-provoking essays comprehensively expand on the concept of media memory. Leading scholars of communication and collective memory research study the significance of media and mediation in collective memory construction, address essential conceptual challenges, and analyze specific case studies with the aim of illuminating theoretical questions.

Chapters

Authors

1. Cannibalizing memory in the global flow of news

2. The democratic potential of mediated collective memory

3. “Round up the unusual suspects”: Banal commemoration and the role of the media

4. Media remembering: the contributions of life-story methodology to memory/media Research

1. Barbie Zelizer

2. Jill A. Edy

3. Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi

4. Jérôme Bourdon

5. Between moral activism and archival memory: The testimonial project of ‘breaking the silence’

6. Reclaiming Asaba: old media, new media, and the construction of memory

7. Joint Memory: ICT and the rise of moral mnemonic agents

5. Tamar Katriel, Nimrod Shavit

6. S. Elizabeth Bird

7. Tamar Ashuri

8. Television and the imagination of memory: Life on Mars

9. Life history and national memory: The Israeli television program Such a Life, 1972-2001

10. History, memory, and means of communication: The case of Jew Süss

11. Localizing collective memory: Radio broadcasts and the construction of regional memory

12. Televising the sixties in Spain: Memories and historical constructions

17. Memory and digital media: Six dynamics of the globital memory field

18. Archive, media, trauma

19. Mediated space, mediated memory: New archives at the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin

20. Anachronisms of media, anachronisms of memory: From collective memory to a new memory ecology

17. Anna Reading

18. Amit Pinchevski

19. Irit Dekel

20. Andrew Hoskins

Volkner, I. (ed.) (2006). News in Public Memory: An International Study of Media Memories across Generations. New York: Peter Lang.

This cross-cultural collection compares and contrasts media-related childhood memories across three generations. It studies the role of media in the intergenerational transfer of collective memory in nine countries, specifically focusing on the role and influence of the news industry.

Article

Author

1. Introduction

2. Australia

3. Austria

4. Czech Republic

5. Germany

6. India

7. Japan

8. Mexico

9. South Africa

10. USA

1. Ingrid Volkmer

2. Christina Slade

3. Theo Hug

4. Jan Jirák

5. Gebhard Rusch, Ingrid Volkmer

6. Keval J. Kumar

7. Reiko Sekiguchi

8. Margarita Maass, Daniela Rivera, Andres Hofman

9. Matthew D. Payne, Jill Dianne Swenson, Thomas W. Bohn

11. Perceptions and memories of media context

12. Construction of memory

13. Memory and markers: Collective memory and newsworthiness

14. Globalization, generational entelechies and the global public space

11. Christina Slade

12. Keval J. Kumar, Theo Hug, Gebhard Rusch

13. Ruth Teer-Tomaselli

14. Ingrid Volkmer

Williams, D. (2009). Media, Memory, and the First World War. Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Media, Memory and the First World War studies how the dominant mode of communication in a popular culture – from oral traditions to digital media – shapes the structure of memory within that culture. It inspects the history of memory from the Trojan War to World War I and theorizes that contemporary digital media facilitate changing memory structures.

Part

Content

I. Memory and Media

1. Modern memory

2. Mediated memory

II. Classical Memory: Orality and Literacy

3. Oral memory and the anger of Achilleus

4. Scripts of empire: Remembering Virgil in Barometer Rising

III. The End of the Book and the Beginning of Cinema

5. Cinematic memory in Owen, Remarque, and Harrison

6. “Spectral images”: The double vision of Siegfried Sassoon

IV. Photo/Play: Seeing Time and (Hearing) Relativity

7. Photographic memory: “A force of interruption” in The Wars

8. A play of light: Dramatizing Relativity in R. H. Thomson’s The Lost Boys

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